The introduction provides an overview of the link between religion and war, offering a broad sketch of classical legends, wartime ethics, national sentiments, and ritual traditions. This is followed by summaries of each chapter.

The theories outlined in chapter 1 and the cultural principles and premises described in Chapter 2 provide us with lenses through which we now can examine the Iliad's two complete oath sacrifices of Books 3 and 19. In the first part of this chapter, we shall examine each element of the oath-sacrificing ritual scene, as well as the cohesion of its elements into a liturgical order, as defined in Chapter 1. As part of this examination, we shall weigh each element in the oath-sacrificing scene against other instances of that same element as displayed in other ritual events in the Iliad, and also against a handful of conspicuously similar events referred to in Near Eastern texts. To explore the cohesion of the ritual's various elements we shall attempt to trace the intertextual tensions between the apparent performance pattern of the ritual and the typical poetic scene of oath-sacrifice, relying on theories introduced in Chapter 1.

The second part of this chapter has a more elusive aim, which is to gauge the extent to which a resonance between ritual slaughter and battlefield slaughter, if any, could have been intuited by ancient audiences to the Iliad. To establish that there was such a resonance, we first shall explore some shared lexical features between the oath-sacrificing ritual scene and certain killing and dying scenes, to illuminate some common narrative shapes and themes.

EPICS AND RITUALS

It has been argued that the way a hero engages the terms of his or her destiny is the very stuff of epic literature. The nature of fate and the cosmic principles which shape it penetrate the personal narrative of the epic hero usually at that point when he or she is close to death. Such is the case in the Iliad, especially in the poignant dying scenes of Sarpedon, Patroklos, and Hector – major heroes beloved by gods and men alike, whose deaths elicit pondering by divinities, foreshadow one another, and point ahead to the death of Achilles. Unlike those heroes, Achilles chooses to die young, and his coming to terms with his fate is a measure of his truly heroic stature. Yet the pathos of his fate is built up by the pathos of the other heroes, whose deaths in turn are built up by shorter dying scenes of lesser characters. So, for instance, the death of young Polydoros, Priam's “most beloved son” who is stabbed in the back while fleeing from Achilles (20.407–18), anticipates the longer dying scene of his brother Lykaon, who begs Achilles to spare him because his mother already has lost her other son and has just received Lykaon home again, after Achilles had abducted him (21.54–135).

Extravagant destruction by gods on the battlefield is not an unusual theme in religious texts. Across the spectrum of world religions, such destruction is cast in many guises – protective, punitive, inspiring, even illustrative of divine play. The Iliad has its share of these guises. The protective guise might be seen when Athene wards off missiles from Menelaos on the battlefield as a mother swats flies from her sleeping babe (4.128–31); a punishing guise is evident when Zeus, Poseidon, and Apollo storm the Achaian wall with crashing waves after the war, because the Achaians built it without divine permission (12.8–36); it is specifically to inspire the Achaians that Athene enters into the throng of warriors so that she might be seen (4.515–16); and, as for play, Zeus laughs in his heart with joy when he sees the gods coming together in strife on the battlefield (21.389–91). In this chapter, I will trace out some guises for battlefield the ophanies in the Iliad, exploring their apparent effects on the humans who witness them and concluding with an examination of cosmic destruction represented as a response to oath-violation. Such images in the Iliad will be set against similar Hittite, Assyrian, and biblical images, which will help to demonstrate some cross-Mediterranean poetic patterns for the expression of divine power on the battlefield.

Before we can investigate the violence that emanates from oath-making rituals in the Iliad, we must have an adequate understanding of the specific cultural premises and principles on which Homeric oath-making is based. In the introduction, an oath was defined as a ritualized configuration of a relationship between two or more individuals, a configuration specified by solemn utterances, gestures, and sometimes artifacts, that may be sealed by a symbolic act. The cultural premises behind such ritualized configurations are amply, if elliptically, demonstrated in the Iliad, especially in depictions of warriors who reject oaths, who tend to be in the throes of battle passion and oblivious to the pull of cultural constraints. Such depictions inversely prefigure the paradigm of the oath-honoring man. Exploring these premises will help to illuminate the principles behind oath-making in the Iliad. In addition, we will enlist some Near Eastern comparisons to shed light on some ancient Mediterranean oath-making principles, and we will outline the premises and principles of Homeric oath-making against the anthropology of ritual set out in Chapter 1. Achilles' oath by the scepter in Book 1 will be discussed at the end of the chapter as an example of the poetic highlighting and manipulating of some of those ritual principles.

OATH-MAKING PREMISES